Melanie Phillips Doesn’t Understand That Muslim Extremists Who Decapitate Babies Are Not To Be Called “Savages”

If I were to craft a dark satire about moral inversion, cultural suicide and Orwellian disinformation I couldn’t do much better than the plot summary below:

Five members of a Jewish family in Israel — including a three-month old baby– are literally murdered in their beds, with psychopathic fury, by Islamic extremists.

A British journalist takes the media to task for its minimal, tepid and equivocating coverage of these murders, referring in passing to the perpetrators — and those who support and celebrate them — as “savages.”

A sock-puppet Islamic organization complains to both the local media watchdog organization (the Press Complaints Commission – PCC) and the police that all Arabs have been defamed.

Shortly thereafter the sock-puppet advises the usual media suspects (one of whom he works for) of his heroic j’accuse! moment and the airwaves are shortly vibrating with accounts of PCC and police investigations against the journalist and her newspaper.

While everyone watches the attendant Kabuki theater the innocents in Israel are still very much dead and the forces that caused their deaths — and the deaths and misery of countless others — remain unexamined in any serious way.

There is of course nothing fictional, nor remotely funny, about this sequence of events. The recent murder of the Fogel family — shrouded by the media in euphemism and attempted mitigation — is described in much more clear-eyed fashion by Caroline Glick:

Ruth Fogel was in the bathroom when the Palestinian terrorists pounced on her husband Udi and their three-month-old daughter Hadas, slitting their throats as they lay in bed on Friday night in their home in Itamar.

The terrorists stabbed Ruth to death as she came out of the bathroom. With both parents and the newborn dead, they moved on to the other children, going into a bedroom where Ruth and Udi’s sons Yoav (11) and Elad (four) were sleeping. They stabbed them through their hearts and slit their throats.

Glick goes on to describe the released photos of the victims:

They are shown as they were found by security forces.

There was Hadas, dead on her parents’ bed, next to her dead father Udi.

There was Elad, lying on a small throw rug wearing socks. His little hands were clenched into fists. What was a four-year-old to do against two grown men with knives? He clenched his fists. So did his big brother.

It has since emerged the baby was actually decapitated. “Savages” is the very least of terms that could be applied. “Savages” in relative terms, is a compliment. Having read the full account of this massacre and having forced myself to look at the pictures, my preferred term for these animals would be “targets acquired.”

Enter journalist Melanie Phillips and her blog post Armchair barbarism. Like any other sane, rational and decent person Phillips sees the glaringly self-evident moral issues here and excoriates the media — demonstrably deficient in all of these areas — for ignoring them. The New York Times is only the first of several examples she cites:

Overwhelmingly, the media have either ignored or downplayed the atrocity – or worse, effectively blamed the victims for bringing it on themselves, describing them as ‘hard-line settlers’ or extremists. Given that three of the victims were children, one a baby of three months whose throat was cut, such a response is utterly degraded.

The New York Times blamed Israeli ‘defiance’ over renewed ‘settlement’ building in the wake of the massacre for throwing

“already shaky peace efforts into a new tailspin.”

So to the New York Times, it’s not the Arab massacre of a Jewish family which has jeopardised ‘peace prospects’ — because the Israelis will quite rightly never trust any agreement with such savages — but instead Israeli policy on building more homes, on land to which it is legally and morally entitled, which is responsible instead for making peace elusive. Twisted, and sick.

Uh-oh … “savages.”

Add to this the suggestion that people who hand out candy to celebrate the beheading of an infant might suffer from “moral depravity” and you know there’s going to be righteous indignation.

Enter the sock-puppet, one Inayat Bunglawala, chair of Muslims4UK, an organization whose web site doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2009 (of course nothing much has been happening with Muslims in Europe lately so that’s understandable) and whose Facebook page has 713 members.